It's the scandal of the month that Republican Representative Mark Foley solicited sex from adolescent male congressional pages in the same years that he headed the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and made his reputation for his work on legislation targeting sexual predators.
Foley has been universally condemned for his "hypocrisy," as well he should be. It's especially piquant that his castigation of a much-reviled-by-moralists former president has resurfaced to embarrass him and to amuse the rest of us: "It's vile. It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction." What kind of rationalizing maneuvers were going in the Foley mind when the Congressman uttered these words about Bill Clinton?
Foley's "hypocrisy" is anything but unique. Shakespeare nailed the phenomenon centuries ago. In one of his great wisdom-in-madness moments, King Lear sees beneath the surface: "Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!/ Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;/ Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp'st her."
Every few weeks or so, it's discovered that one of our very own American beadles is enthralled by the exact sin against which he inveighs. There's the anti-pornography campaigner who has accumulated some unusual apparatus in his clammy basement; the anti-vice TV preacher caught with a shady lady in a by-the-hour motel on the Memphis strip; the anti-gay state legislator photographed dancing in a downtown bar that caters only to men; the radio talk-show host who wants to send drug-users up the river for life but is himself addicted to hillbilly heroin; the flabby propagandist for virtues who pulls all-nighters at Atlantic City blackjack tables. ll of them are hypocrites, I suppose, but in my view "hypocrisy" is a label that has no explanatory value.
It's not as though people set out to become hypocrites. It's not an aspiration or a chosen career path. There's no Hypocrisy 101.
I'm not an anti-vice campaigner or a psychologist and have no particular claim to expertise in this area, but I don't believe that people like Foley are cloven-footed sociopaths.
Nor do I hold to the theory that it's simply protective coloration: "if I scream loud enough no one will suspect me." That shabby dodge has long since worn through; who else do we suspect nowadays if not the loudest shouters?
I think the migration to hypocrisy must be very gradual. The Foleys of this world are driven by the flesh. Their vice becomes their obsession. I believe that they try to turn that obsession, that vice, in a positive direction. Let's say a person is fascinated by adolescent boys; he can then take on the cause of sexual exploitation and he can manage his compulsion in a socially acceptable manner. He can study it, observe it, catalog it; he can stay in close touch with the temptation but not succumb to it; he can in fact turn his vice into virtue. It's an excellent game plan. It's a healthy compensatory reaction.
I'm sure that there are anti-vice campaigners who employ such tactics successfully. But there are others who, in moments of weakness, do succumb. Now they're in a tricky psychological pickle. Who better to appreciate the damage to adolescents than the person who has made a professional study of the outcomes? So now Foley and the others know in their hearts that they are truly hateful. Perhaps they persuade themselves that their power makes them invulnerable. Meanwhile, they redouble their efforts to help the exploited; they pass legislation and start foundations. And so the gulf between their professed beliefs and their private practices becomes deeper and deeper. Good deeds and evil deeds become inextricably entwined.
In the story, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (a child-molester) inhabited the same body.
I think that what must happen next is that self-loathing kicks in, big time. And as we all know, self-loathing and self-betrayal are twinborn. So the Foleys among us cooperate in their detection. They engage in riskier and riskier behavior until they are exposed. Because, in fact, they want to be exposed. As Lear says, they "strip [their] own back[s]." Because once they're exposed and the punishment commences, they can then set out on the path of redemption, which, I'm absolutely convinced, they crave as much or more than they crave the pleasure of their vice.
When La Rochefoucauld said that "hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue," he acknowledged that the term "hypocrisy" did not explain anything--that it's an incidental by-product of human frailty.
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